


rewritehistory

by tonyang (kurusui)



Category: PRISTIN (Band), SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-29
Updated: 2019-07-29
Packaged: 2020-07-24 23:49:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20023042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kurusui/pseuds/tonyang
Summary: Seungcheol has always been awful at expressing things directly. So it gives her even more shivers to think about the look in his eye on the spring evening when he told her to her face:Yeah, I’ve liked you for a long time.Nayoung can hardly sleep at night.





	rewritehistory

**Author's Note:**

> _You knew and I knew_  
>  _That this is not an easy road_  
>  _It’s not that you and I didn’t know_  
>  _That not many flowers bloom on this road_  
>   
>  —day6’s hurt road
> 
> (other lyrical inspiration: lorde - supercut)  
> for the nysc day6 fest. all my love to the leaderlineists for making this possible ♥

**02 / 2018**

On an uncharacteristically quiet night, Nayoung sits on the steps outside the Pledis building, three months before the doorway behind her is used to transfer tons of equipment onto a moving truck. Sometimes she just likes to sit and think and remember.

“Aren’t you afraid of being seen?” someone asks, slow footsteps behind her. He is joking around but his voice sounds drained.

Nayoung turns around. Seungcheol stands at the top of the stairs, looking out at the streets. It’s such a state of uncertainty, where she doesn’t really want to invite him to sit down, but can’t stand the suspense.

“I have nothing to hide,” she says plainly. “And it’s nice out here. I’m just trying to enjoy the view.”

“We haven’t talked in a while.”

Wrapping her cardigan around her shoulders, she says: “It’s really cold outside. You should go inside.”

He stays fixed in his spot. “What about you?”

“I don’t think we should do this, here,” Nayoung says. The average sasaeng would have been all over this ten minutes before either of them showed up. Even worse, someone from Dispatch probably has hundreds of pictures on their camera just from the five sentences they managed to exchange without any eye contact. She can just imagine the headlines now. 

“I thought you had nothing to hide.”

“Fair,” she says, lying through her teeth. Nothing is fair in her eyes but bringing it up would be counterproductive.

Behind them, there are boxes of supplies stacked inside the entryway. “So much has changed since we first stepped foot into this building and now we’re moving.”

“So much has changed just between us,” she says. “For better or worse.” She winces at her own words, bittersweet in her mouth. “We weren’t close but we weren’t... this.”

“I didn’t know if I deserved to be friends with you,” he says. “I would have said I didn’t.”

“That’s silly,” she tells him. “If you felt so much guilt you should have done something about it. But no one expected you to. You just had to be there. For us.”

Nayoung rarely talks to him now, or the other boys. She just doesn’t see them in the hallways anymore. But there was something she held onto anyway; the knowledge that the people who she grew up with would keep supporting them even if it was hard.

Something about his demeanor changes. “I didn’t think it would be as simple as caring, or showing I cared,” he says, and his voice wavers— “because it was different. It was all the more scary,” he continues, “because—”

“Seungcheol,” she says, taking a deep breath. “Just do me a favor and stop talking.”

Nayoung has only been afraid of one thing this whole time. She can’t let him say it or she’ll never forgive him. It’s going to go something like this:

  1. She has no control over the situation.
  2. This forces her to confront her own feelings which she was gladly repressing.
  3. Now she's the bad guy for saying no because she wants to keep her head on straight. 



“I love you,” he finally says, mind swimming and surely knowing he will regret it.

Before she lets it reach her heart she has to cut it off. 

“You _jerk_ ,” she mutters under her breath, spins around, opens the Pledis front doors to enter, and lets them slam shut behind her.

**07 / 2013**

>What makes him fall in love with her?

Soonyoung asks this late at night, when almost all the lights are all off in the practice rooms, even with an upcoming showcase. Both of them sit on the floor, backs to the mirrors and sweat dripping from their foreheads. Light peeks in from the hallway where they left the door open earlier, but that’s all their tired eyes can stand.

Seungcheol scratches his head. The truth is that Soonyoung never used those words — he said “start to like,” but Seungcheol’s brain conflates the phrases and makes him wonder what the difference really is. “I don’t know how, or when it really happened. I think I just saw her one day and thought about how lucky I was to train with her, because she’s beautiful and works hard, except it was out loud, and Mingyu started making fun of me.”

“And then you knew,” Soonyoung reasons.

“And then I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

At 19 Seungcheol is hardly the least mature of the boys he’s training with, but sometimes he feels like it doesn’t help him at all. It’s strangely difficult to put into words why you like someone, and Seungcheol finds that he never really thought about it until Soonyoung asked.

“Seeing her smile makes me happy,” he starts.

It was just kind of neat when he found out they were the same age. A new friend. She was pretty though, and kind. He really wasn’t going to say anything about it. He just noticed a lot of things about her during practice and it’s silly so he pretended it was nothing, but once the other kids caught wind of it, it was really over for him. He likes to watch her dancing, too. Even though her lanky arms don’t move quite as sharply as the famous idols’ do, it’s still captivating.

And before he knew it, he told all of that to Soonyoung, straight from the heart.

“Do you think she even likes you, though?” Soonyoung whispers.

Without realizing it, he always tries to find a spot near her during co-ed practices. Sometimes it takes a little maneuvering around, but with the help of a forced conversation with Chan or Junhui, he usually gets pretty close. And he always tries to attract her attention: with whatever it is he has to do to embarrass himself loudly so all the eyes in the room turn to stare at him, but in reality he’s only looking for one person.

Nayoung does look at him and make eye contact once.

“That was good,” she says after a runthrough of a dance break. Everyone disperses to get water, but he stays standing. “You looked cool.”

He grins, unable to stop himself. “Thanks.”

“One day people will say that to you and it’ll just roll right off your shoulders,” she tells him. Mingming tosses him a towel which he luckily catches without looking completely uncoordinated. “Hope you haven’t lost your rookie mentality yet.”

“I won’t forget this moment,” he swears, and she laughs.

“Sometimes I wonder,” Seungcheol says.

“Are you gonna ask her out?”

Seungcheol flushes, invisible in the dark. “I don’t know.” Everything is too uncertain at this point. 

“If you wait too long, you’ll have to compete with her fans!” Soonyoung expects that to fire him up, but he looks pensive instead.

“Something I really want to do is ask someone out after debuting. Like, that proves we’ve made it, basically. And it’s something to look forward to.”

“Woah,” Soonyoung gasps. “You gonna wait for her to debut if it’s after us?”

“It would be really cool if we both debuted, but I don’t know if I can wait that long. How many more months do you think until we debut?”

“I can’t do it unless I believe it’ll be next month,” Soonyoung says.

“The pessimist in me thinks it’s going to be a while. They haven’t really told us anything.”

“I can live without worrying too much about it. But— I don’t think you’re the kind of guy who can plan it all out, hyung. I think you’ll just blurt it out by accident. Be careful when you’re drinking!”

Seungcheol socks him in the shoulder for that, but he’s probably right. He’ll do it at the right time, is all. Whenever that is. 

Realistically, none of them had any way of knowing what was to come in the future.

**09 / 2018**

When Nayoung really takes time to think about it — and she has a lot of time on her hands now — she liked him, at some point. But it just got harder and harder to justify having feelings at all. 

When Nayoung allows herself to consider it, sitting at the kitchen table, the stark reality hits her. She’s eating noodles at home on a Friday afternoon because she has no schedules. The person she supposedly likes is thousands of kilometers across the world touring a new country every day. Literal separation compounded on emotional distance. It just doesn’t make any sense.

It would not end well if she decided being in love was okay. It was fine when she kept it to respect, and stealing glances into the practice room from the hallway, and something in her heart clenching whenever he would talk about growing together as a team, and the sparkle in his eyes when he would talk about the future—

The disparity between them is just too much now. It’s not his fault, really, but it is what it is. She’s the one who’s going to get hurt.

So when he says the one thing that feels like a betrayal of all her hard work she has no choice but to run away from him.

**05 / 2019**

Nayoung has been packing up her stuff for weeks. It’s like slowly pulling off a bandage. Each day after practice she reexplores the building, looking for loose articles of her clothing and other traces that she’s ever been here, traces that she’s been a part of this company for the past 8, 9 years. 

And then he shows up. Always when she doesn’t ask for it. Seungcheol walks out of a conference room the moment she approaches the entrance, and she stops in her tracks. 

Neither of them will break the silence, or the game of who can stare at the other the longest without caving in.

“I’m sorry,” she says eventually. “I never really apologized for how I reacted.”

“Do we need to talk about that right now?” 

“I’m just trying to say a proper goodbye.”

“I would rather not say goodbye,” Seungcheol says. “I don’t want closure.”

“I don’t want to leave anything behind.” 

“I don’t want you to take everything away,” he says. “Like you were never here.” He’s too transparent. That’s what has always hurt the most about him.

She shakes her head. “This building is foreign to me, anyway. It’s not like I had the chance to make many memories here—”

“Is it just about the physical place to you? Does it not feel like leaving a family? A home?” 

“Of course it does,” she says bitterly. “I am just trying to soften the blow for myself.”

Seungcheol is taken aback. “I’m sorry.”

Nayoung sighs. “I’m sorry, too.”

It’s like someone turned the air conditioning off, because suddenly the hallway is stifling.

“Good luck,” he says sincerely. “I really wish you all the best.”

Nayoung’s hands shake. “I have to go.” 

He doesn’t say anything, just nods and turns his head, goes back into the conference room and disappears like he forgot something, but clearly just wanted to give her some space.

Nayoung runs. On the way to the exit, she feels her eyes stinging and tries not to acknowledge it. Ultimately she wipes her tears with paper towels from the bathroom because there are no tissue boxes to be found anywhere on this floor. Something about that is kind of symbolic, she thinks, as she furiously dries her eyes, aware her makeup is sliding off her face. Not even the bare minimum is provided for her here. 

There has to be more for her somewhere else, somewhere better. That’s all she has left to hold on to.

In the end she leaves something somewhere to be found. Handprints on the walls that the new trainees will clean off, practice videos on the old computers, and a red baseball cap on the first floor training room.

“Use it well,” she writes on a sticky note, hiding it inside the rim of the hat. Now that it’s hung up on the rack with everyone else’s hoodies and bags, no one will know it was hers. Maybe because of that, it can stay there for a long time.

**11 / 2019**

Seungcheol was allowed to go home for the holiday this year, and after family dinner he raced his older brother to the couch to play video games like they were kids again. 

“Hey,” his brother says, knees bended so he can turn up the volume on the side of their TV (their remote’s broken). Their mother folds laundry in the kitchen.

“Yeah?” Seungcheol asks, playing a practice round of soccer against the computer. 

“What happened to that girl... the one who was in IOI, I think?” Seungcheol swallows. “What was her name...”

“Nayoung,” he says faintly. 

“Was it Doyoung?” his brother asks, not paying attention and grabbing a controller. “From your company?”

Seungcheol loads up a new game. “I think she went into modeling,” he answers, and tries to forget about it. 

He thinks she goes into modeling because one day he is in the mall and there is a cardboard cut out of her figure staring them in the face. It is taller than she really is. He knows because it’s taller than him and he’s taller than her.

“That’s just an endorsement though,” Seungkwan says pointedly when he tries to conjecture at her current position of employment. “You can be an idol and do CFs.”

“Seungkwan, you idiot. If she was an idol we would know.”

They just stand there looking at it for a while. Yes, it’s an advertisement for Innisfree and yes, it has “Lim Nayoung” printed at the bottom near her feet, no descriptors or group names attached. But it doesn’t have to mean anything. Seungkwan asks Seungcheol to hold his iced Americano so he can open Instagram and send her a DM asking how she is, but he refuses to take the cup so Seungkwan has to do it with one hand. 

“I don’t think you should have done that,” Seungcheol says. Now he’s going to want to hear the answer.

**04 / 2020**

“You’re going to be late?” Nayoung frowns. She’s in line to order tea and was deciding on where in the cafe she wanted to sit when her phone started ringing.

“I’m so sorry, unnie! We’re only like three minutes away, it’s just that—” Sungyeon lowers her voice— “one of the boys, and I’m not naming names, was messing around with the computer and straight up deleted some of the recordings! I’m so mad—”

Nayoung’s expression barely changes, though she laughs a little to herself. “Keep calm, Sungyeon. It’s fine. I’ll get a table for three.” 

“And we need to redo them while the boys are still here because their schedules are crazy and we’re not taking the hit for delaying their production... Yewonie is on it right now,” she says, taking a breath at last. Working on the Produce 101 groups’ music sounds really stressful, but Nayoung is so proud of them anyway. Finally, a contract they signed with Pledis that actually followed through with its promises.

“Your regular coffee order? You’ll probably need it.”

“That’s fine! Thank you Nayoung unnie, we’ll be right over!” Nayoung waits until Sungyeon hangs up before she puts her phone away.

It’s getting darker outside, and she wonders how late they’ll be up tonight, putting together the songs. Nayoung orders a chamomile tea and looks for a seat near the door so she can find them easily when they arrive. The Pledis recording studio isn’t far, so she just watches out the window.

A hooded figure walks past, and she wonders if they’re coming inside or passing by. The door makes noise, and the evening breeze rushes in. And then Seungcheol is there. 

The spot is too obvious to ignore. Before he has the chance to pretend he didn’t see, she looks up. Undeniable mutual acknowledgement.

“Hi,” Nayoung says.

“You have bangs again,” he says in lieu of a greeting. He looks tired, and inexplicably still a little attractive.

“You have dark hair again,” she responds. “Looks healthier than before.”

“Maybe a little. New conditioning products, and all that.”

“Are you here to order?” she asks, and he nods, so she motions for him to go up to the counter. Her hands go clammy, wondering what he’s going to do when he’s done.

He brings his long receipt and asks: “Can I wait here for a minute?”

“If you don’t mind, I don’t mind,” she says, though that’s not entirely honest. He pulls out the chair facing her and sits.

Seungcheol is still wearing his practice room sweats. Nayoung is in a gathered skirt and large hoop earrings. It’s the worst possible matchup. “This is awkward, isn’t it?” He laughs uneasily.

“It really is,” she says. “I should have figured I’d run into one of you guys in this area. It’s... lucky that it was you.” She stares at her teacup.

Seungcheol sighs. “We miss you around, you know.”

Nayoung’s breath catches. “Do you?”

“I wish I could rewrite history,” he says, a little too candidly.

“What does that mean?”

“I wish I had done things differently.”

“Sometimes I resent you,” Nayoung admits, carelessly. 

Seungcheol looks as if his heart dropped to his stomach. “Is that how you really feel about me?”

“Unfortunate, isn’t it?”

“Why?”

“Because you told me you love me,” Nayoung says. No tense was supposed to qualify that, either.

“It was true,” Seungcheol returns. Nayoung accidentally bites the edge of her lip, swallows the blood and continues.

“It was still,” she says, “three years too late.” She pauses. “Or three years too early.”

“When you like someone you don’t exactly calculate when you’re going to say something about it, you know—”

“Stop,” she says. “Just stop. You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Taking control. Leaving me with nothing.”

“What do you want?” he asks quietly. The barista calls his order number in the background, but neither of them move to do anything about it.

“Can I ask a question?” she says.

“Go ahead.”

Eyes slightly narrowed, head tilted: “Has it been long for you? All of this?”

“Yeah.” He says it easily.

“Honestly?”

“Honestly. I—”

The door opens and chimes next to her, and if her eyes were closed she would never know what he was saying. But years of performing in loud places has taught her how to read lips too well.

“Oh,” Sungyeon says, staring at the two of them, seated across from each other at the table closest to the entrance. Yewon trails behind her, mouth opening wide as she comes into the line of view. “Are we interrupting something?”

“No,” Seungcheol says, gathering his things, “I was just leaving. Nice to see you again.” He jogs to the counter, apologizes and thanks the baristas, and heads out the door with bags of coffee.

“See you later,” Yewon echoes. The windchimes ring against each other again as the door settles back into its frame. Sungyeon directs her attention back at Nayoung, willing her to explain with frantic hand gestures and eyebrow lifting.

“I need to step out first,” Nayoung says, and runs outside. 

“...Okay,” Sungyeon says, once she’s already gone.

Nayoung needed to get out so she could let out a deep breath she’s been holding for years. She wasn’t trying to follow him out the door, but she notices he’s out of sight anyway. Seungcheol doesn't turn back. All she can see is the dark night, and streetlights that used to be familiar.

**03 / 2021**

What Seungcheol doesn’t ask about is the things he’s never said to her.

Nayoung doesn’t want to be the kind of person who isn’t resolute. If she makes promises, she should keep them! So if she swears to never forgive Choi Seungcheol for confessing to her, she should _never forgive him_ , not threaten to crack every time she sees his face again.

It’s not like she was ever unaffected by his presence, which is half of the problem. The other half is that even if they don’t see each other, that doesn’t mean she can forget about any of it. Nayoung can focus on work, and proving herself, and doing better by herself than she ever had under a suffocating agency all she wants, but it doesn’t help when Kyulkyung gives her unsolicited updates on how the boys are doing every time she makes it to Korea. And it’s not like she can reject those, because something inside her wants to know.

The saddest part is getting this text message from Jisoo’s number like she doesn’t know Seungcheol’s the one behind it. It reads like Jisoo might speak, but would Jisoo want to tell her out of the blue to _take care of herself always?_ Would Jisoo say to her _I’m still sorry I couldn’t do anything for you?_ He may care for her too, but he has no reason to feel the guilt leaching through those words.

He would probably say, hours later, when he’s finally alone in his room: _You know who the sentiment was from, right?_

Seungcheol has always been awful at expressing things directly. So it gives her even more shivers to think about the look in his eyes on the spring evening when he told her to her face: _Yeah, I’ve liked you for a long time_.

Nayoung can hardly sleep at night. 

“She’s not worth it,” Jeonghan offers.

“Don’t say that.” Seungcheol buries his head in his hands, face slammed against sheets of paper he ripped out of his notebook while trying to write lyrics last week. 

“Just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.” Jeonghan shrugs and spins around in his rolling office chair, stolen from Wonwoo’s desk. “She doesn’t deserve you—”

“Not really—”

“You don’t deserve her, more like,” he says, and Seungcheol frowns at him.

“I thought the point of this exercise was to boost my self-esteem.” Seungcheol has been holding a recurring pity party for himself for what feels like years, and, well, at this point it really has been that long. He hasn’t truly been hung up on her for three straight years— more like he just keeps going back to that memory whenever Jihoon gives him one of those answer-the-prompt forms to generate song ideas. _When was the last time you were in love?_ it asks often, and Seungcheol just wants to shake Jihoon until he gets dizzy — come up with something original! He always does though, in the final product.

It’s kind of sad anyway. Seungkwan keeps bringing home Innisfree products to spite him, even though now they endorse Nature Republic.

Jeonghan waves it off. “We have to acknowledge the facts. You’re annoying as hell, and Nayoung is a goddess.”

“SHUT UP.”

“You really could have loved anyone else,” Jeonghan says. Both of them know it’s true.

“Speak for yourself.”

“At least I got over her,” Jeonghan says, swirling the straw around in his coffee. Seungcheol has no way to reply to that. 

He keeps thinking about it though, all the way to the airport. The alternate universe where he moved on, where he got hurt by the rejection or even angry, and decided his time was better spent loving something else, or someone else. But he looks at the reflection in the black screen of his phone and thinks this lost in love look is not bad for the solo pictorial he’ll have to shoot in Tokyo, so this is okay for now.

Someone drops their water bottle, in front of where he’s seated in the gate area. It rolls on the carpet to his feet, and Seungcheol picks it up instinctively, stretching his hand out to reach the girl sitting in front of him. 

He would really be much better off paying more attention to his surroundings.

“Thank you,” Nayoung says. Her voice is muffled by a black mask, but he recognizes her eyes instantly. 

Her manager is five seats away. Seungcheol’s is in the row behind him. And three meters away in every direction is a fan with a camera — like they know exactly where to push the boundary.

Seungcheol decides he doesn’t care. “Now we're just strangers in an airport,” he jokes.

She smiles just a little. “If only that was the end of it.”

Both of them are dressed in all black today. Seungcheol lifts the shades off his head and tucks them into the pocket of his blazer. Nayoung takes off her heels and sets them on the ground so she can cross her legs.

“What are you doing in Japan? Are you staying in Tokyo?”

“Fanmeeting,” she says. “My first one in Japan.”

“Oh, congratulations,” he says, genuinely thrilled for her. “I had no idea.”

“I figured.” 

Passengers line up and form a messy queue longer than the barriers can contain, like they’re foreseeing the announcement: “Boarding to Tokyo will begin now! Boarding for First Class...”

Nayoung watches as Seungcheol stands up, clutching his boarding pass. He stops like he’s waiting for her to rise too, but she pulls out a book, almost adamant to prove she’s not going anywhere yet.

“You’ve picked up reading,” he says, having realized. “I mean, not to say you haven’t read before. Correct me if I’m wrong.” He looks at the floor, aware how much he stumbled over his words.

She doesn’t. “To save money I would have spent on other things to keep me entertained,” she replies. “And to learn more.”

“Well, it’s a good hobby. Better than playing mobile games the whole trip,” he says, shaking his cell phone in his hand. “I’ll see you around.” His manager motions for him to follow; the gap between them widens.

“Wait— can I just say something?” He turns around.

“Yeah?”

Nayoung looks up into his eyes. “You’re always doing more than you have to for other people. It just reminds me of when you used to send encouraging messages to everyone before evaluations. I really used to admire that about you.”

Seungcheol smiles. “I’d still do that for you if you asked me to.”

**10 / 2021**

Sometimes when Nayoung is lonely she thinks about Seungcheol saying “I love you,” and dreams about rewriting history.

“Why?” she asks, swinging her legs off the countertop. He sets aside the apple he was peeling and leans in.

And curled up on a cot in the infirmary, he answers, “because you’re you.” She smiles from the visitor’s chair.

In her imagination, he gives lots of answers. She’s pretty, he tells her, and charming, and laughs quietly when someone tells an unfunny joke. These are things she already likes about herself. But maybe — and that’s the scary thing about love — he likes parts of her she doesn’t even know exist. 

Nayoung never gave him the chance to say any of these things.

Seungcheol checks his phone regularly in the van on his way home, a commute of six hours from today’s performance. Pick it up, text some friends, watch some videos, put it down and close his eyes. Then start all over again. Wonwoo in the other aisle seat was blessed with the ability to sleep on demand, but Seungcheol feels too restless to shut his eyes for too long.

Midnight passes. His phone buzzes quietly.

 **Park Siyeon** **  
** Are you eating well?

Have a good Monday

He stares at it for a minute. Reminiscent of something he had sent before, or, more accurately, badgered Jisoo into sending. Last text received from Siyeon November 14, 2019. Just to be safe, in case it really is Siyeon feeling charitable with kind words:

 **Choi Seungcheol** **  
** Yeah

You too!

Five minutes later she replies.

 **Park Siyeon**  
You’re texting the wrong number back

 **Choi Seungcheol**  
I don’t have her number?

 **Park Siyeon** **  
** Must I do all the work for you.

That she maybe can’t, or won’t see his response is sort of regretful. But all this time Seungcheol has been searching from validation from her and not the other way around.

“The little things go a long way,” he says to Wonwoo, who is snoring beside him. Hansol pats him on the shoulder from behind.

**04 / 2022**

At six in the morning Seventeen’s newest manager wakes Seungcheol up and tells him there’s going to be a surprise guest on his radio show appearance that night. Seungcheol, in an absolute daze, lets the words slip in one ear and out the other. But later he can’t say that no one tried to warn him, because even Jonghyun texts him that afternoon and asks _Did you see who else is coming tonight?_

Seungcheol never replies to him because he falls asleep on the couch in between schedules. He didn’t get any sleep last night, really, because insomnia. The fans that watched his 4am radio V Live can attest to that.

So it’s the biggest surprise of his life to read this placard when he walks into the recording studio: HYOKIRA! HYOJUNG’S KISS THE RADIO GUESTS, 220418, NU’EST JR, SEVENTEEN S.COUPS, LIM NAYOUNG.

Everything comes full circle. Both of them are already there, talking earnestly with headsets half-pulled over their ears, and turn their heads when he walks into the room. Jonghyun is grinning. Nayoung looks like she was already prepared for this. Nothing about Seungcheol feels ready.

“How does it feel to be reunited?” Hyojung asks when the show starts, bright and cheery. “I know you guys were famous for being same-aged leaders under the same agency!”

“Famous might be a stretch,” Jonghyun says, laughing. “It’s nice to all be together again.”

Nayoung folds her hands. “I am grateful to have the opportunity to be here,” she says in her best business voice, glancing at her manager. The strings her team must have pulled.

Seungcheol watches her from across the table, forgetting to speak. “I’m glad, too. It’s been a long time.”

“Ooh!” Hyojung reads the script in front of her. “And you’ll be standing on the same stage again soon!”

Nayoung squints at the paper. “Huh?”

  * NU’EST, SEVENTEEN and LIM NAYOUNG all announced for Dream Concert.



Hyojung reads the words out loud for the benefit of the listeners. Nayoung is in shock. Jonghyun and Seungcheol break into smiles.

“Congratulations! You didn’t know?” Jonghyun asks. 

“I had no idea,” she says blankly, and looks out the window to her manager again. He gives a double thumbs up, and she looks like she’s going to cry straight into the camera lens.

“I’ll be there too,” Hyojung adds, with a big grin. “But anyway! Let’s read some comments from the viewers and listeners...”

Jonghyun is the strongest link, the safe ground, the neutral zone. Nayoung is trembling.

Seungcheol is seated in the break room waiting for his manager to return from Seokmin’s schedule on the other side of the building. “I want to introduce you to someone,” Jonghyun says, approaching him, and Nayoung is already pulling back out of embarrassment.

“I feel like this was a bad idea after all,” she says, tugging at her hair. 

Jonghyun just laughs. “Seungcheol, this is Im Nayoung. Nayoung, this is Choi Seungcheol.”

“Nice to meet you,” she says, barely meeting his eyes. 

“Nice to meet you...” he responds, buying into the scenario.

“I trust you can take it from here?” Jonghyun says. 

Seungcheol and Nayoung talk in the hallway, five feet from the vending machines. Periodically someone comes by and they care, they just don’t hide— they just chat about business, or the past, or the future. It’s all very professional. Until he asks:

“Will you give me a second chance?”

Instead of answering, she asks, “Would you give me one?”

“Sure,” he says.

“I like you,” she tells him. “Can I have your phone number?”

In the end, this is all she wanted. To begin again. Nayoung doesn’t need anything definitive. At the least something indicative of a new start, not promising of the ending. And at this point that is all she can really ask for.

While he types his number into her phone, Seungcheol asks her what she wants from the vending machine.

She runs her fingers over the keypad, then steps back. “D4.”

He gets down on his knee to fish it out of the dispensal and when he tries to take it out, he drops the can and bangs his hand on the side or something and laughs.

It’s a pretty laugh.

“For you,” he says, holding the can out on his palm. 

The lemonade is ice cold, sour and sweet.

Nayoung takes him to the Han River. 

“It’s a place of healing,” she says, wind blowing through her dark, long hair. Nayoung’s favorite spot is a stone barrier between the grass and the walkway, wide enough to sit on. The lamp post behind them lights up just enough to see the color of their shoes.

The waves lap quietly against the riverbank. “It’s beautiful,” Seungcheol says.

“Are you enlisting next year?” Nayoung asks suddenly.

“Yeah.” It hasn’t really sunk in yet. 

"Do you have a girl who will wait for you?"

Seungcheol almost chokes on his water. "What?"

"It’s from a drama,” she explains with a laugh. “I’ve been rewatching old dramas. This one is from 2013. It was just such a cute line that I had to say it.”

“Oh... Haha. It just threw me for a second.”

“Maybe it would have worked better if we were still eighteen,” she reflects.

Seungcheol brings his knees to his chest. “It’s hard to remember we’ve grown up so much sometimes.”

They sit there for a long while, just watching the lights flash on nearby bridges, bikers flying past, birds settling on the fence.

“I think I would wait for you,” she says. She looks at him, chin up high. Confident.

He shakes his head. “I won’t make anyone wait for me,” he says. “It’s not easy to wait for so long. I know that much.”

“It would be nice to try.”

“But Nayoung,” he asks, “for once, can we not think about the future?”

“You want to think about now?” Her hair, tied back low and long, flies back behind her again. 

Nayoung wraps her arms around his neck, kisses him and doesn’t let go.

**Author's Note:**

> _The flowers that are seen from time to time_   
>  _I didn’t know how precious they were_   
>  _Because they’re so beautiful and lovely_   
>  _Should we stay here?_
> 
> the hurt road is the reality to the expectation of the flower road - the idol life is much more painful than it seems, but they are well aware of this & still made the choice to stay. @haengseol / @likewaterising


End file.
